Participants in self-directed retirement plans may fail to understand and mitigate investment and longevity risk, putting their retirement security at risk. Variable deferred annuities with lifetime income and investment guarantees could rectify the problem.

We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an “all or nothing” decision.